There are few countries in the world in which women have experienced more sudden and shocking changes than in Iran. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Pahlavi monarchs tried to modernize Iranian women’s status along western lines by force. Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers invoked Islamic authority to impose severe legal and professional restrictions on women. But as historian Nina Ansary shows in her new book Jewels of Allah, these grand narratives leave out the actions of Iranian women themselves. Drawing on her research at Columbia University, Ansary has set out to show how Iranian women have long shaped their country’s history, and how they are changing the Islamic Republic today. IranWire spoke to Ansary by phone from New York.
This is an edited version of our interview with Nina Ansary. Read the full version.
You begin your book with a set of misconceptions you have encountered about women in Iran. Who expressed these misconceptions to you?
When I was rewriting my doctoral thesis as a mainstream book, I decided to go on social media. I began to post, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a photo with a caption about an accomplished Iranian woman. This could be a woman during the Achaemenid era, or a woman in post-revolutionary Iran — any woman who had accomplished anything of significance during Iran's history, pre- and post-Islam.
Many people said, "We never knew. We just assumed that women, after the Khomeini regime took over, are really oppressed, in seclusion, behind the veil, and subservient.” One of the stereotypes I'm trying to shatter is that behind the veil, and behind the image that the Islamic Republic is portraying, while women may be oppressed within the laws of the Islamic constitution, they are not oppressed internally.
You write that in 1979, women from a wide range of backgrounds actually supported Khomeini. Why did he appeal to them?
Khomeini had a very vague rhetoric when it came to women. I always say that as women we have a responsibility to look beneath the surface, because Khomeini, decades earlier, in A Clarification of Questions, had actually embedded his vision of the role of women in an Islamic society.
Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, who was one of the first women to become a judge under the Shah, has explained why she also supported Khomeini. She felt that he represented more of the real Iran, and the essence of Iran, than the Shah had done. I quote her saying, "It took scarcely a month [after Khomeini landed] for me to realize that I had enthusiastically participated in my own demise.” So if an educated woman like Shirin Ebadi would fall for the vague rhetoric of Khomeini, that speaks volumes about what Khomeini was able to capitalize on.
Since the revolution, some Iranian women have tried to advance their rights within the logic of Islamic theology, especially during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami. But Iran’s laws are made or overseen by male clerics, who claim to have the highest religious credentials. So can women really succeed by challenging clerics on their own territory?
These are women who want to maintain their religiosity, but are conflicted because they cannot maintain their religiosity in a religion that denies them their rights based on their gender. They have been able to demonstrate something really important, that everything has to be able to evolve and adapt to the changing needs of a 21st century society — meaning that which held centuries ago cannot be the finite word of God, and that Islam is able to evolve and adapt.
When you say clerics, Khatami is a cleric, and Khatami has written, "If religion goes against freedom, it will lose.” So it's not all clerics who are beholden to such ideological distinctions. There are many progressive clerics who actually believe in women's rights, who actually support this new trend, which is reinterpreting passages that are used to justify the denigration of women in Islam. Not all clerics are beholden to antiquated visions of what a woman should be.
But to some extent those women are relying on male reformist clerics to advance their points within a kind of male racket, which is the clergy.
No one said it's an easy climb. It's an uphill battle, but the most important thing is that today the women's rights movement in Iran is a grassroots movement. Through their continued activism, women have been able to partially reverse and amend some discriminatory laws. That's the very important premise.
Women can now serve as what is called investigative or research judges. Unmarried women were also able to get permission to study abroad. In 2006, a group of Iranian women's rights activists, including Shirin Ebadi, started the One Million Signatures campaign for equality. The campaign successfully pressured parliament to amend the inheritance law in 2008, giving women the right to inherit their husbands' property. Also in 2008, women were granted the right to equal blood money but only in accidents covered by insurance companies. That doesn't sound like much, but it's better than nothing. They were able to prevent the passage of laws enabling men to take additional wives without the consent of the first wife. These are some of the many, painstaking, partial amendments that women have been able to make through their activism.
Much of the history you describe touches on current events. For example, you mention the dramatic changes in family planning that Iran introduced in the 1980s, which caused population growth to decline substantially from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. In 2012, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei announced that that had been a terrible mistake. What do you think has caused Khamenei’s newfound interest in increasing birth rates?
For women in Iran, one way of maintaining their autonomy is not getting married. Once you get married, there are a lot of obstacles that come in your way. You are hailed by hardline clerics as mothers and wives, yet you are discriminated against in the laws that resolve custody cases, or you are not allowed to leave the country without your husband's written consent. Another way is, women are not having children. Iran has had one of the highest fertility declines in the Middle East and North Africa in the last decade alone.
What Khamenei is trying to do — and he actually just recently considered a ban on contraception and vasectomies — is to hail the Iranian woman as a wife and mother. You can only force an ideological vision for so long if people are not beholden to it. You can ban contraception, but you can't force women to have children. Women in Iran don't reflect his vision, and it's a push-pull dynamic that reflects an irrational way of looking at a woman as a procreator who is subservient to her husband, and there to be a primary caregiver.
President Hassan Rouhani has made repeated statements about increasing opportunities for women and ending discrimination. Meanwhile, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Iran says the situation of women has worsened during Rouhani’s presidency. What do you think Rouhani will deliver?
The president in Iran is severely handicapped by the supreme leader. So on one side you have president Rouhani who says that women should enjoy equal rights, but on the other, you have the supreme leader who comes out against them and says that gender equality is one of the West's biggest misconceptions. It's very difficult to navigate and go down a road where you are consistently being blocked by the powers that be. I can only take what Rouhani says on the surface, and say that he appears to be a more progressive cleric who is looking for ways to bring Iran somewhat out of isolation with this nuclear agreement.
I was surprised to read your conclusion that Iranian women could be an “instrumental force” in effecting the dissolution of the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic has been around for 36 years now, and it looks like a survivor. What makes you think it could dissolve?
Don't forget that women were one of the biggest contributors to the collapse of the Pahlavi Monarchy. And this was at a time when women were not educated. When the Shah left Iran, approximately 35 percent of the female population was educated. Today that's over 80 percent. During the monarchy, there was the absence of what would be considered a viable feminist movement in Iran. Although women were given rights, those rights were not earned; they were bestowed from above. That is not, by definition, a women's rights movement. So what has happened in post-revolutionary Iran is that, during a most unexpected time, there is actually a vibrant and ongoing feminist movement. They have made certain strides though their activism. If there is going to be any change, or a trend toward a more progressive atmosphere, I think the main push will come from women.
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